A thorough examination of the life and work of one of histories greatest mathematicians, the "Shakespeare of Numbers", Leonhard Euler: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/eulers-exponentials
Leonhard Euler was the most prolific mathematician of all time. He introduced the symbols e for the exponential number f for a function and i for √-1. He discovered what many mathematicians consider to be the most beautiful expression in mathematics, e ix = cosx + i sinx: a relation connecting the exponential and trigonometric functions. The exponential function and its inverse the logarithm function appear throughout mathematics and its applications, in physics, engineering, mathematical biology, chemistry and economics.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/eulers-exponentials
Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website.
Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
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Professor Raymond Flood

Raymond Flood has spent most of his
academic life promoting mathematics and computing to adult audiences, mainly
through his position as University Lecturer at OxfordUniversity, in the Continuing
Education Department and at KelloggCollege. In parallel he
has worked extensively on the history of mathematics, producing many books and
writing diverse educational material.

He
is Emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford,
having been Vice-President of the College and President of the British Society
for the History of Mathematics before retiring in 2010. He is a graduate of
Queen’s University, Belfast; Linacre College, Oxford; and University College, Dublin where he obtained his PhD.

He
enjoys communicating mathematics and its history to non-specialist audiences,
as he has done recently on BBC Radio 4’sIn Our Timeand on transatlantic voyages with the
QM2. Two of the most recent books with which he has been involved areThe
Great Mathematicians,which
celebrates the achievements of the great mathematicians in their historical
context, and Mathematics in Victorian
Britain, which assembles into a single resource research on the
history of mathematicians that would otherwise be out of reach of the general
reader.

The 19thCentury saw the development of a
mathematics profession with people earning their living from teaching,
examining and researching and with the mathematical centre of gravity moving
from France to Germany. A lot
of the mathematics taught at university today was initiated at that time. Whereas
in the 18thCentury
one would use the termmathematician, by the end of the 19thCentury one had specialists inanalysis,
algebra, geometry, number theory, probabilityand
statistics, andapplied mathematics. This series of free
public lectures looks at the shaping of each of these mathematical areas and at
the people who were involved.

In
the succeeding years he will choose topics illustrating how mathematics has
developed more recently and, in particular, what mathematics can, cannot, and
hopes to achieve.